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Watching for Signs

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The debut collection of poems from Sligo-based Ann Joyce

“While, once again, there are scenes of gentle beauty in Joyce’s tapestries of landscape and remembrance, real richness comes in the change of pace and perspective achieved by a poem like Leningrad Woman, which traces the brushstrokes of Boris Ugarov as skilfully as it renders the destitution of his muse, and of his love for that muse… Several of the poems in this volume are quietly moving, especially those dealing with the old age and death of her parents and their generation; a woman looks west to “that place her husband/ waits as she waited evenings for him”, six sons burying their mother see “the dust, that was once their father, dance”, a mother fills a bag with her burial clothes, “breathing life into them” — Belinda McKeown, The Irish Times

“She is rarely wordy but uses language in a primitive essential manner with hints of wisdom easily found everywhere… Her development might be worth watching.” —Poetry Ireland Review

ISBN 9781904556367 Paperback 140 x 216 mm, 70 pp 2005

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About The Author

Ann Joyce was born in Co. Mayo, later moving to Boyle, Co. Roscommon where she was a founding member of the Moylurg Writers group. Her poetry has been widely published in literary journals and she was short-listed for the Sunday Tribune / Hennessy Literary Award for poetry as well as being selected as a participant in the 2002 Dublin Writers Festival / Rattlebag Poetry Slam. She took part in the Poetry Ireland Introductions readings series in 2004 and in the lunch-time poetry reading series at the Yeats Summer School in 2002. Living as she does in the area between Knocknarea and Benbulben in the north-west of Ireland, it is perhaps not surprising that Ann Joyce has an ongoing interest in Celtic mythology which is reflected in the subject matter of many of the poems in her debut collection, Watching for Signs (2005).